Among the Victims: One U.S. Citizen and a Dutch Student at Indiana

To those who knew her at Indiana University, Karlijn Keijzer seemed to excel at everything she did, from her work as a doctoral student in chemistry to her leadership on the university’s rowing team.

In her studies, Ms. Keijzer’s focus was on improving human health. On the water, she strove for championships.

Her heart was in the lab, friends said, and before she left school for a trip back to her home in the Netherlands, Ms. Keijzer, 25, was working on a research project that had the potential to help cancer patients and people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, her academic adviser said.

Friends said she was on her way to a vacation aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was bound for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from Amsterdam, when it was shot down on Thursday over eastern Ukraine. The Indiana University president, Michael A. McRobbie, called her death “a loss to the campus and the university.”

Ms. Keijzer was one of at least two passengers on Flight 17 who had lived in the United States. Another of the 298 people aboard was Quinn Schansman, 19, who was born in the United States while his father had a Dutch government posting in New York, relatives said.

Although he had spent most of his life in the Netherlands, Mr. Schansman had kept his dual citizenship, a fact President Obama noted on Friday in a news briefing. “Our thoughts and prayers are with his family for this terrible loss,” the president said. So far, he is the only American citizen who is reported to have been aboard the plane.

Mr. Schansman’s grandfather was born in Indonesia — a former Dutch colony — and his family had planned a three-week vacation there. He was on his way to meet them when the flight was brought down, said Katinka Wallace, a relative. “Quinn had to stay behind in Holland to work,” she said.

He was studying business in Amsterdam and played soccer for the Olympia ’25 club in Hilversum, the Netherlands, relatives said. By Friday night, three Facebook community pages had been set up in his memory. His own page, last updated on June 20, mentions his girlfriend, features the assortment of photos expected of a college student and, now, includes notes of grief and loss.

“Dear cousin and friend,” one says, “we’re going to miss you.”

In Indiana, friends remembered Ms. Keijzer as being so dedicated to her work that she would lose touch with worried friends, said Rachel Weigler, who was Ms. Keijzer’s roommate in 2012 and 2013. Ms. Weigler said she and a second roommate “would try to call her, trying to find out if she was O.K., and actually, she was just working at the lab.”

Mu-Hyun Baik, Ms. Keijzer’s doctoral adviser and an associate professor in the School of Informatics, said her long hours in the lab were most recently devoted to “preparing a computer simulation on bryostatin, an anticancer drug and a promising drug candidate for treating Alzheimer’s disease.”

“Karlijn was a bright, talented doctoral student, a diligent researcher and a dear friend to all of us who worked with her in our research group,” Mr. Baik said.

Before coming to the United States to study, Ms. Keijzer competed in the European Rowing Junior Championships in 2006 and the World Rowing Junior Championships in 2007, friends said. At Indiana, she won athletic honors in the sport, and during the 2011 season, she helped lead the women’s rowing team to a 14-5 record.

“She came to us for one year as a graduate student and truly wanted to pursue rowing,” said Steve Peterson, the school’s head rowing coach. “That year was the first year we really started to make a mark,” he said. “And she was a huge reason for it.”